Combustion

by Berengaria Brown

  “Sound and Light Show? I didn’t know they had one. I’d better check out the brochure and make a list of what I want to see.” And now I sound like a boring nerd.

  They chatted for a few more minutes then hung up. Xonra shook her head at herself. “You’d better practice talking like a normal, intelligent woman or this is going to be the worst weekend of your life instead of the best,” she warned herself. However, she couldn’t resist changing screens from the paperwork she was supposed to be checking, and instead looking up Berisford Village.

  It had never occurred to her to research Jeremiah J. Curlin’s historical town, but as soon as Glenn mentioned it she knew she’d love to visit it. To see for herself what it was all about, why Mr. Curlin was making so much money out of it and especially why young women didn’t want to work there. “I guess an hour is quite a long commute, but plenty of people take that long to get to work each day. Maybe not for minimum wage though. Likely that’s the problem. He simply isn’t paying them enough.”

  General store, candy store, candlemaker, blacksmith, tinsmith, drapery store, apothecary, wheelwright, bakery, post office. Then there’s the houses, the school, a horse bazaar and the Big Hill Mine. The mine tour alone takes an hour. I can see why we’ll need a couple of days there. But it sounds awesome. I can hardly wait until the weekend. Plus the sex. Oh God! Must pack sexy lingerie!

  Xonra looked around her office hurriedly, hoping she hadn’t said that last remark out loud, but there was no one walking past her open door or standing around in the hallway as far as she could see, so she gave a grateful sigh and very deliberately closed the Berisford Village screen down and concentrated on her job.

  Chapter Three

  Xonra had expected to be sitting in the backseat, but the car they arrived in, unlike the sporty little vehicle they’d used to travel to MaryAnne’s memorial service, was one of the few cars that still had a bench front seat, so she was tucked between them for the drive out to the village.

  The hour flew by as they laughed and chatted about everything and nothing, finding that they agreed about many things, and when they didn’t, they were able to discuss it in a companionable, not argumentative, manner.

  They decided to simply follow the map and look at everything in order. “Seeing we have the entire weekend there’s really no reason to rush from display to display,” said Glenn.

  “There’s five different places where we can get a meal, so whenever we want lunch it shouldn’t be too far to walk,” added Morgan.

  “Good point,” said Glenn.

  “Thirty acres is quite a large area. Looking at the map, when we go underground into the Big Hill Mine, we travel a long way to come out at the other end,” said Xonra thoughtfully.

  “Well, maybe we should do that straight after lunch, then, when we’re fresh and rested,” suggested Glenn.

  They wandered along the boardwalk, looking into the various stores. Some of them were just storefronts with window displays, others were real period-style shops with attendants dressed in costumes and the wares of the late nineteenth century on display, some available for purchase. Xonra was fascinated by the tinsmith’s store with its metal plates and metal cookie cutters and other goods.

  Four women were dipping candles in the candlemaker’s store. They looked to be hot, bending over the pot, dipping the wicks in again and again as the candles gradually grew fatter.

  “No wonder the candles are so expensive,” whispered Morgan. “It must take hours and hours to make them.”

  “And that’s after they’ve assembled all the ingredients. I bet there’s a lot of work involved in the preparation before this stage too,” added Glenn.

  Xonra just nodded. The women doing the candle dipping looked young, barely eighteen, she guessed. And it was hot, hard work bending over all day like that for minimum wage. No wonder Jeremiah J. Curlin constantly needed new staff. Surely he could pay them more than minimum wage. Everything she’d seen so far in the stores was very expensive and she knew he was making a lot of money out of the village, although undoubtedly there would be some heavy expenses too.

  They watched the apothecary and his assistants hand-rolling pills, spent some time in the drapery store where visitors could dress in period costumes and have their pictures taken, and decided to look in the candy store later, when it wasn’t so crowded.

  The next interesting area was a musket-firing range. Xonra sat on a log seat and watched while the men were shown how to load the musket then fire it at the target. Like most of the people with them, Glenn and Morgan were hopelessly inaccurate shots.

  One of the men in costume beckoned to a small boy standing nearby. The child looked to be maybe seven and was dressed in costume. He stepped up to the range, loaded a musket and fired, hitting the bull’s-eye.

  While everyone was clapping, the child handed back his musket, took off his cap and walked around the crowd collecting coins.

  Xonra watched him as he handed his cap of coins to the man in charge of the range, who put the money in the till. Oh wow unfair! The kid doesn’t even get to keep his own tips! she thought.

  “I’m starving. Let’s eat,” said Morgan. The bakery was just down Main Street a little way. It offered fresh bread baked in a stone oven and served still warm with homemade berry preserves and cheese.

  “Yum, nectar of the gods,” murmured Glenn, taking a third slice off the plate.

  “Look,” said Xonra, pointing to a sign on the wall. “They make the butter and cheese themselves using the milk from their own cows. The same with the preserves. They grow their own berries to make the jam. No wonder it tastes so good.”

  “I remember my grandma making jam,” said Glenn. “She let me stand on a stool and help her stir it in a huge cauldron.”

  “Let’s go see the mine now,” said Morgan, jumping up as excited as a schoolboy.

  Xonra and Glenn laughed and followed him out of the bakery and down the path into the Big Hill Mine.

  At the entrance to the mine they were given a stern lecture by the guide. “Parents are responsible for their children. Everyone must stay in the main shaft, which has been fully restored and is perfectly safe. We’re in the process of restoring some of the minor shafts and you can watch the workers through the iron gates but must not enter. Other tiny shafts are quite unsafe and no one may enter them.”

  He then handed out maps to everyone, reminding the parents to keep a close watch on their children. Finally they were able to walk down the slope and into the mine. Small lights near the top of the shaft gave enough light to walk safely, but it was dim and a little spooky. Some of the children screamed while teenagers teased each other.

  Xonra, Glenn and Morgan stayed near the rear of the group, letting the children and young people get ahead of them. “More peaceful this way,” murmured Glenn.

  Both men were fascinated by the old machinery and equipment, Morgan even going to the extent of taking photos of some of it on his cell phone, while Xonra was thinking of all the men and boys who’d spent twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, down mines like this, so many of them dying young from lung disease or accidents. Even today mining has a bad record for safety, she thought.

  They’d fallen well behind the last of their group, Glenn and Morgan waving their arms and arguing amicably about a piece of machinery that Xonra could not identify and wasn’t interested in anyway, when she heard voices talking from a side shaft. Well aware of what the guide had told them, she stood quietly to the side of the main shaft and looked through a locked metal gate, down the side tunnel. Two men in costume were standing in front of a wooden door, one holding the arms of a small boy, the other unlocking the door with a huge iron key. As Xonra watched, the man on the left opened the door, and the man on the right pushed the boy through, then followed him inside, while the first man locked the door again. What the hell was that about?

  Assuming the man was about to come toward her, Xonra quietly rejoined Morgan and Glenn and waved her hand in front of th
eir faces. “Shall we catch up with the rest of our group, or were you planning to stay here all night?” she asked.

  “Oh no. Our plans for tonight involve a big, soft bed,” said Glenn, and the three hurried after the group.

  Their conversation became general but at the back of her mind Xonra’s subconscious was trying to make sense of what she’d seen. And she realized that the costumed man had never reentered the main tunnel.

  By the time they emerged from the mine they were all ready for a rest and a cold drink. Unsurprisingly, right by the exit was the blacksmith’s, the horse bazaar and coach rides. Morgan wandered down Main Street to buy them some sodas while Glenn and Xonra looked at the horses.

  “Wow, fifty working horses in the village. That’s a lot.”

  “Not just any horses either. All Percherons and Clydesdales, which means big horses. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to brush them and feed them,” said Glenn, waving an arm at the stables where several men were watering a long line of animals.

  “Oh, yes. Imagine having to muck out fifty loose boxes every day. Not my idea of fun.”

  Xonra looked at the men working in the stables. They were most definitely not aged eighteen to thirty. She thought about all the men she’d seen here. The guide at the mine, the man at the musket firing range, the shopkeepers, the apothecary, the photographer. Not one of them was in the eighteen-to-thirty age group. Most of them would have been late forties, early fifties, a few approaching sixty. Now that is weird.

  Morgan arrived back with three ice-cold drinks and they sat on a log seat, drinking them while they watched people playing a game of chess on a life-sized board. The white squares were sand and the black gravel. People in costumes were the chess pieces, with children for the pawns and adults for the rest. The two people “playing” the game called out the moves and the “pieces” stepped forward, backward or diagonally as instructed.

  “Bad move,” said Xonra, shaking her head.

  “Huh?” asked Morgan.

  “Mistake. Checkmate in two moves.”

  The “pieces” waited impassively and sure enough, the game was over in just a few moves. As soon as it finished, a little girl walked through the crowd with her apron held out and people threw coins into it and compliments to her. The child smiled a little tentatively, then walked back to an older man, who scooped the coins out of her apron and placed them in a leather purse at his waist, then all the characters left the area.

  “Next game will begin in half an hour, folks,” called the man in charge.

  “You choose, Xonra. Where would you like to go now?” asked Glenn.

  Xonra checked the map, then her watch. “It’s four thirty now and the Sound and Light Show doesn’t start until nine. But we need to allow time for a meal and it’d be good to have a bit of a rest first too. How about we go back and check out the candy store, the post office and the school, then call it enough for today?

  “Since it’s four thirty won’t the kids have gone now? Maybe we’d better leave the school until tomorrow?” suggested Morgan.

  “The brochure says the school is open eight a.m. until seven p.m. but maybe they just mean you can go in and look at it, not that the children and teachers are there. If there’s no one there we can come back tomorrow, sure.”

  The candy store was just as crowded as before, but this time they squeezed through the crowd to look at the old-fashioned boiled sweets and sticks of candy. From the long lines at the counter this was a very popular item. Signs above the counter proclaimed all the candy was made in the village from original recipes.

  The post office had a series of “Wanted” posters on the walls, and both Glenn and Morgan had their pictures taken and their heads inserted into posters. “I’m going to put this up on the wall in the office,” said Glenn. “I’ve always wanted to be famous!”

  The doors of the schoolroom were wide-open with a teacher standing at the front of the room, a long ruler in his hand pointing at various things on the chalkboard. The older children were answering questions as he pointed to each one in turn. On the far side of the room was a group of smaller children, each copying letters onto a slate. A girl of maybe twelve was supervising them.

  Quite a large crowd had gathered at the doors of the school, when the teacher rapped on the floor with his ruler. All the children stood. “Times tables. Begin,” the teacher ordered.

  “Two ones are two. Two twos are four,” the children began. Even the littlest kids were chanting, Xonra noticed. When they got to the sixes she saw that most of the smaller children were now quiet, although quite a number of them chanted their ten times table. As the children chanted “Twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four” a burst of clapping came from the crowd, and the girl who’d been supervising the younger children came out of the classroom holding her apron out as the child had at the chess game. People dropped coins into her apron, and a few dollar bills were thrown in too. Xonra looked back into the classroom and saw the teacher speaking with one of the children, a boy of maybe eight or nine. The child looked almost terrified. Surely not just for making a mistake in his times table? He must have done something bad I didn’t see.

  Glenn gave her a gentle hug. “Tired?”

  She looked up at him and saw Morgan’s light blue eyes smiling at her as well as Glenn’s dark brown ones. “Yes, I am a bit. It’s been a full-on day.”

  “Let’s go to the hotel then, check in, soak in the hot tub, maybe take a nap, so we’re ready to enjoy the Sound and Light Show tonight,” Glenn suggested, his eyebrows waggling as he said “nap”.

  “Sounds like a plan.” Right now she did feel tired and a little confused by some kind of undercurrent at Berisford Village. But she had to be imagining it. There were thousands of tourists here every day and if anything was not right, someone would have noticed. Wouldn’t they?

  * * * * *

  Their suite was huge and the bed the biggest one Xonra had ever seen. And the hot tub, wow! “There’s enough space here for all the pieces off the chess board, not just us,” she said as she stood in the bathroom doorway. “It’ll take hours to fill!”

  “Let’s turn it on now, then, so it’s ready when we want it,” suggested Morgan, leaning over to close the drain and turn the taps on hard.

  He soon had the temperature adjusted how he wanted it and they moved out to the sitting area, Glenn setting coffee on to heat and fiddling with the TV, while Xonra flopped into an armchair to look through the tourist brochures.

  “The same company that owns the village owns this hotel too. Not surprising I guess since they are both ‘Berisford’. So I suppose that means good old Jeremiah J. Curlin himself owns this place too.”

  “Jeremiah who?” asked Morgan, wandering around the room.

  “Jeremiah J. Curlin. He’s a respected client at HR Resources but at present he’s driving everyone mad wanting to hire women aged eighteen to thirty to work at the village and only offering minimum wage so no one wants to work for him.”

  “Minimum wage? That’s a bit rough. Those people were working hard. I wouldn’t like to be that blacksmith pounding metal bars in all that heat. Or those women bent over dipping candles,” said Morgan.

  “We haven’t been to the houses yet, but I understand he’s having trouble finding young women to iron and bake there too. It would be hard work on minimum wage. Plus there’s the hour commute each way,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Remember in the bakery it said all the bread was baked fresh on site? That’s likely what the women in the houses have to do. They make their own butter and cheese too, so maybe the women have to do that too. That’s hard work, that sort of thing,” said Glenn.

  “I just assumed they used modern technology for the butter and cheese. Churning butter isn’t easy to do. Well, so I’ve heard. I’ve never actually done it myself,” she laughed.

  “Guess we’ll find out tomorrow when we get to that side of the village,” said Morgan, picking up the restaurant menus. “More import
antly, which restaurant do you want to dine at tonight?”

  They discussed their favorite meals for a while, then Morgan checked on the water in the hot tub and pronounced it full enough for them to get in.

  Gratefully Xonra shrugged out of her sweaty clothes, packing them into a laundry bag before following the others into the bathroom.

  Glenn and Morgan were bickering about whether or not to add bubbles and scent to the water, so Xonra solved the argument by dumping in the entire bottle of lemon bubble bath.

  “Aghh, I’ll stink like a girl,” moaned Morgan.

  “It’s lemon, not a feminine scent,” explained Xonra.

  “It’s not too bad really,” added Glenn, holding a handful of bubbles up to his nose and sniffing.

  “The guys at work will never let me live this down,” Morgan moaned again, but less stridently.

  “I won’t tell on you,” Glenn soothed.

  “You had a lemon scent on your own towels, so don’t try to tell me you don’t like it,” added Xonra.

  She stepped into the tub and sank down into the water, almost purring as the heat soothed her muscles, muscles she was only just realizing were quite tense. Sitting with water almost to her neck, she drew in a deep breath of sharp lemony scent accompanied by heat and steam and man. “Wonderful,” she said.

  They chatted quietly about the various things they’d seen, relaxing in the water, planning the next day’s sightseeing. Several times Xonra thought of talking to them about her vague niggling feelings about the village but to do that seemed crazy, ungracious and basically rude. There was no logic behind her feelings, no evidence. Why would she be privy to something wrong that hundreds of thousands of tourists hadn’t noticed? It was not as though she was a trained observer or a spy or even a security guard.

  Besides, what had she seen? A child disobeying his father? A child being chastised for bad behavior? Young women tired and hot after a hard day’s work? An employer who preferred sexy young chicks to older women on his staff? All one hundred percent normal. So why was that itch in her brain about Berisford Village? Get a grip, woman. You’re naked in a hot tub with the two most delicious men on planet Earth and you’re thinking about work. Are you insane or something?